On 31.03.2005, at 20:10, William A. Rowe, Jr. wrote:
...If this does NOT have the same effect as the Apache license, I'd appreciate
an explanation of how it differs.
I see that the ASL clause doesn't include derivative language;
3. Grant of Patent License. Subject to the terms and conditions of
this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual,
worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable
(except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made,
use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work,
where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable
by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their
Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s)
with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted. If You
institute patent litigation against any entity (including a
cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work
or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct
or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses
granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate
as of the date such litigation is filed.
That is essentially the same language as used in the ICLA [1] so I wonder...
Three things occur to me;
*) We are missing the derivative clause for patents. If we did add this in the ASL 2.1 or 3.0, contributors have agreed to be bound to the language of future licenses. But it seems that due to how narrowly and specifically this clause was written, would a revised clause 3. be sufficient to bind previous patent contributions?
*) Does the fact that this was narrowly written actually increase the position of the patent holder, to the detriment of the user? Were it better had we said nothing about patents, v.s. this specific language?
*) Why did we limit the impact of the self-destruct clause within the patent license to terminating patent licenses alone? If we spark GTW (global thermonuclear war, a running joke among members) why would we explicitly preserve their copyright license grants?
...if all this has to be applied to the ICLA as well then? Are we actually allowed to sublicense any grants of patent licenses received under the current version of the ICLA?
Cheers, Erik
[1] http://apache.org/licenses/icla.txt
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